Ever since we released Gowalla for iPad several months ago we’ve been imagining new ways to visualize the relationships our friends have with places. Check-ins and Photos are two unique lenses we’re already using to look at people and places. Trips are another one. Today we’re excited to introduce Highlights.

Highlights are like little rewards you can give to places that are important to your life. Some are quite straightforward and practical like Best Cup (of Coffee). Some are a bit more esoteric or inspirational like My Happy Place and Scenic-At-Night. Regardless, they’re all fun. We’ve launched the feature with 18 unique Highlights and more will be added—hopefully inspired by your suggestions!

Today you’ll be able to add your Highlights and view your friends’ Highlights on our website. We’ll be adding the feature soon to our mobile apps on iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry. Imagine checking in to learn that a good friend proposed nearby or has a suggestion on where to go to catch the best sunset ever.

I hope you enjoy Highlights as much as we’re enjoying them now. Take 5 minutes to add a few today and invite your friends to do the same. You never know what you’ll learn about each other!

We love music, and we love cool things involving cool places. So Gowalla HQ pretty much came to a halt yesterday when we discovered Arcade Fire’s breathtaking, interactive HTML5 project, The Wilderness Downtown. Aside from be an incredible example of what can be done with HTML5, it’s also a completely beautiful project that uses some everyday technology (Google Maps) to do something extraordinary with places near to your heart. So if you haven’t given it a spin yet, on your next coffee break  head over to http://thewildernessdowntown.com, close all other programs and browser windows/tabs (cos it’s a processor hog) and enjoy!

Brand-new improvements to the Gowalla app for BlackBerry rolled out over the weekend, including:

• Trips
• Items
• Take and post photos
• Ability to post threaded comments

We’re pretty stoked with this latest version of our BlackBerry app, enough so that we’re deeming it out of beta and bestowing the title Gowalla 1.0 on it! There are two easy ways to grab Gowalla 1.0 for BlackBerry:

• Email a download link to your Blackberry
• Direct Download (follow this link from your Blackberry)

We hope all our friends on BlackBerry devices will grab the latest version, kick the tires, and let us know what your thoughts are!

Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh is heading out on a 3 month bus tour to promote his new book, Delivering Happiness, a wonderful read about not only the culture and history of Zappos, but also Tony’s own exciting life story. We are stoked to be partnering with Tony and the DH team to be part of the tour! Specifically, we’ve worked together to create a mobile Spot for the bus.

Red Bull and LIVESTRONG are also sponsoring the campaign, so we’re going to have some item fun with this: everyone who checks into the Delivering Happiness Bus is going to receive a Delivering Happiness book item, LIVESTRONG bracelet item, or can of Red Bull item.

So head out, say hey to Tony, get the neat stamp and score a limited edition item!

Folks around the office know me more as a basketball fan, but it’s hard not to love America’s Favorite Pastime when you see all 30 MLB stadiums in all their pixellated glory. With only a few more games left on the season, it’s time to head out to head out to the ballpark, check in with Gowalla, make a memory and add a new stamp (or two!) to your passport.

We woke up yesterday to the news that TIME has named Gowalla to their 50 Best Websites 2010 list. Time says:

The brightly colored badges and the zany-fun interface (as well as the ability to add photos and create trips around locations) make Gowalla the coolest interactive passport there is.

I’m not sure we could say it any better. Also, this is likely the first time Time published the words “zany-fun.” We’re grateful for the love!

We crossed 500,000 photos over the weekend! Tons and tons of great photos have been uploaded to Gowalla, and we’ve been having fun over the last few days celebrating some of our favorites. So which photo was actually Number 500,000? This concert pic from Eir in Oslo, Norway:

Looks like a it was a great event! Concert photos are some of our favorites: we LOVE using Gowalla to commemorate special events (and plus with concerts a photo is one of the best ways to prove bragging rights)! Eir wins a great prize package for being the lucky person with this momentous upload:

• Diana Camera from Lomography
• 2 year Flickr Pro membership
• iTunes certificate
• Gowalla tee, Field Notes memobooks and stickers

We’re also announcing the winner of the Leica V-LUX. A ton of fabulous photos were submitted, and we’ve already announced several winners. (Heck, if you can keep a secret, we’re going to be quietly awarding even MORE prizes in the next few days.) We’ve loved seeing how people use Gowalla photo uploads to commemorate fun journeys, times with friends, and interesting events like Eir’s concert pic. In fact, any picture of a life highlight (a favorite meal, a perfect sunset, that fun day at the beach, etc.) just really makes us happy to see on Gowalla. The photog whose shot won him the Leica V-LUX camera took just that kind of picture:

Aside from being a really neat shot, with the silhouettes and the reflection off the water, we love what it symbolizes: that perfect moment, that great day with family or friends, something you’ll want to remember for a long time. Thanks for using Gowalla to capture and share that memory, John!

Thanks everyone who submitted shots for consideration. As mentioned above, there are going to be a few more photogs quietly awarded in the next few days for their superb contributions. Additionally, we’re about to roll out some rad new Gowalla photo uses, so keep an eye open. Until then, keep up all the awesome photos, and thanks for rocking Gowalla!

Following last week’s State and Country Pins announcement, today we’re excited to let you know that we’ve made some general improvements to browsing your Pins in general. The new Pin navigation makes it easy to see the Trips and Challenges you’ve completed, but perhaps most fun, the Countries and States you’ve visited.

We’ve released pins for all 50 US States and 50 Countries so far. We’ll likely release new Countries in batches of 50 as they’re ready. Of course, we will retroactively award Country Pins for any countries you have previously checked in at as they become available.

We’d like to know how many countries you’ve been to. So, here’s the deal: Tweet a link to the Regions page on your Passport—here’s mine for reference—mention Gowalla and hashtag is #countries so we can find it.

We’ll select a most epic Passport and send you something limited-in-edition from the Gowalla closet.

Update: Many have asked about Canadian Provinces. Those are coming in the future as well. They’ll eventually appear under a separate heading alongside States and Countries.

It’s been about a year since we added Facebook Connect support and the Post to Facebook feature to Gowalla. We’ve always enjoyed seeing stamps from our friends’s Passports show up on the Facebook newsfeed. So when we were given the opportunity to pilot the new Facebook Places API we jumped at the opportunity to layer the richness of Gowalla on top of Facebook’s social features in a new way.

Of course, last night we announced Gowalla’s integration with the Facebook Places product which—at the time of this post—is beginning to roll out to Facebook users. For those who already post the occasional check-in from Gowalla to Facebook, the experience is going to be very similar.

Check-ins posted from Gowalla to Facebook will still feature our beautiful Passport Stamps, the photos you’ve taken, and the comments you leave. The only difference is that these check-ins will now also appear in Facebook Places within Facebook’s iPhone app and at touch.facebook.com.

If Facebook Places is not available in your city, state, region or hamlet yet, Gowalla should post status updates as normal. And, as Facebook Places will only be available in the US initially, it appears as though Gowalla may be the only way for international users to check in on Facebook for a while. Hopefully you’ll give it a try!

As Gowalla grows, we will continue to provide an amazing service that enables you to share your favorite places, events, photos and trips with your friends—regardless of whether they’re on Gowalla or other networks like Facebook and Twitter. We’re looking forward to working with both of these services, and likely others as well, in the future.